June 6, 2024 • 49 mins
The media landscape is undergoing rapid and unprecedented transformations, driven significantly by the powerful influence of artificial intelligence, social media, and remote work.
In an effort to understand modern journalism and predict its future trajectory, Greg Galant, CEO and Co-Founder of Muck Rack, joins host Steve Halsey to discuss Muck Rack’s latest research, The State of Journalism 2024. They delve into emerging trends shaping the media industry and examine how these developments propel the sector forward amidst challenging times for professionals.
We dive deeper into:
In an effort to understand modern journalism and predict its future trajectory, Greg Galant, CEO and Co-Founder of Muck Rack, joins host Steve Halsey to discuss Muck Rack’s latest research, The State of Journalism 2024. They delve into emerging trends shaping the media industry and examine how these developments propel the sector forward amidst challenging times for professionals.
We dive deeper into:
- Balancing the use of generative AI and human intelligence to curate superior content
- The essential elements of the perfect media pitch and why each pitch should always be tailored
- How providing immediacy and accuracy has propelled X to dominate the journalism space
- The inseparable link between journalists and PR professionals
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:06):
You are listening to Building Brand GravityAttracting People into Your Orbit, a GNS
business communications podcast. This is ashow for communications pros across industries looking to
gain an inside of you into industryinfluence. You're about to hear a conversation
with leading industry professionals talking about theimportance of building business impact through sound brand
(00:31):
strategy. Let's get into the show. Hello, I'm Steve Halsey, one
of your hosts of Building Brand Gravity. Did you know that a lack of
funding and trust in journalism are twoof the top concerns of journalists. This
is followed closely by concerns about disinformation. These are some of the findings of
(00:51):
the latest industry research by Muckrack.Muckrack is an all in one public relations
management platform that was developed to helppr professional better managed media relations, glean
insights from more than a thousand journalists, and just really allow them to be
more effective at what they do.We're joined here today by Greg Galant,
(01:11):
who is co founder and CEO ofMuckrach, who's going to give us insights
on these latest trends and take usinto the world of media. It's going
to be really exciting we're going tobe talking about how journalist works, how
AI and social media are impacting whatthey do, and we're else going to
talk about what does and doesn't work, about pitching media in today's environment,
(01:32):
and much much more so. Greg, welcome to the show. Great,
Thanks Steve, thank you for havingme on. Yeah, it's really exciting.
You know, you've you've been quitethe entrepreneur over your time, launching
your first company at fourteen years old, starting your first podcast out of college
called Venture Voice, working with CNNwith you really took me back there.
(01:53):
What when we used to call itcitizen journalism? That was pretty wild looking
at the trends as that came up, helped launch a number of technology ventures,
one of my favorite, the ShortyAwards. You were behind helping create
that for social media, and ofcourse you changed the world a little bit
(02:14):
in two thousand and nine when youco founded muckrack, and that's gone through
a lot of iterations ever since.So can you tell us a little bit
about the founding of muckrack, whatwas really kind of behind that, and
then as part of that, howcome you felt has been important to publish
his annual State of Journalism report formany years now, sure, so funny
(02:36):
enough, I'll started with podcasting.So when I started my podcast interviewing entrepreneurs
about how they got started in twothousand and five, that was like the
first. Now that's a common formatfor a podcast. That was the first
podcast of its kind. So Ithought, okay, let me experiment with
this new podcast medium. Being anentrepreneur, I thought would be cool.
(02:59):
I just talked to other spreneurs andlearn from them, and I got some
amazing guests on I had Reid Hoffmannback when the founder of LinkedIn, back
when LinkedIn still had just fifty employees, the founder of Yelp. I got
John Bogel, the founder of thebandguard Group, an inventor of the Index
Fund. Just some amazing people tobe able to interview and learn from.
(03:21):
One of the people I had onmy podcast was ev Williams, who had
the startup called Oudio. She wasmeant to be a podcast directory and discovery
platform. Odio never worked out,but I watched him pivot to a little
side project that he had called Twitter. So that led me to sign up
for Twitter way early. I gotmy first name on there, just at
(03:43):
Gregory on Twitter, and still haveit, and I later got at Gregory
on Instagram too, just by beingthe first first month to sign up at
least with that name, and sokind of seeing that early social media world.
You know, this is around likeprobably like six I signed up,
and then you know, by liketwo thousand and eight, I realized like,
(04:03):
hey, there's no way to figureout who's worth paying attention to on
social So that led to the ideato launch the Shorty Awards along with my
co founder lese Emol. And thenafter we saw that the Shorty Awards were
really really took off and we gota ton of attention and press covers.
(04:24):
The New York Times, Wall StreetJournal, BBC all reached out to us
to cover it that first year.So we're like, oh, that's interesting,
Like these journalists are using social mediato figure out what to write about.
They're all on social media, andthere's so much just generally digital data
about the journalists you could use tofigure you know, to kind of get
a sense of what's going on inthe world. So that all led to
(04:46):
the idea to launch the first versionof Mark Rack and O nine. And
originally actually it wasn't for pr people. It's just for journalists. It's totally
free. We launched it for journalists. We had over ten thousand journalists requests
to get on there in the firstyear, because they want to have profiles
on the web, they want tohave portfolios, they wanted to find each
other. It was a public website, and I'd keep running into PR people
(05:11):
who would all tell me like,oh, you do muckrack, Like I
love that website. I'm using itto figure out who I should pitch,
who I should talk to, whichjournalists I should care about. She realized
like, oh, that's interesting.It seems like a great business opportunity here
for this market. That's kind ofstart for data to know, like who
should they be talking to, howshould they be reaching out the journalists.
(05:32):
So that led us to relaunch muckrackin twenty eleven. We kept it all
free for journalists and still is today. But then we added the whole platform
for the PR and corporate communications worldto be able to log in, find
the very journals to pitch, monitorthe news, build reports, track the
relationships, show how the journal's relationshipsimpact the coverage that they get. And
(05:57):
we've been on that journey ever since. Wow, so so a German idea,
some serendipity and here you are.And part of that is, you
know, I think one of thethings that really differentiates what you're doing,
and a lot of that goes tothe original DNA is you've just talked about
of really understanding what's on journalists minds, what's in their world. And I'm
(06:20):
assuming that's part of the reason whyyou've done this Annual State of Journalism,
what you're seeing and some broader trends. So maybe you could talk a little
bit about what was kind of theinspiration to really putting out to the world
what journalists are seeing it And beforewe get into this year's study, have
you seen any broader trends over thenumber of years you've been doing your annual
(06:43):
report, any particular changes in theway that journalists work or what they're looking
for. Yeah, so we're seeingyou know, a lot of It's interesting,
like a lot of things change,a lot of things stay the same.
You know. One of the thingswe've found kind of consistently is that
journalists are you know, always lookingfor short, really tailored pitches, whereas
(07:06):
I think a lot of people tendto, you know, sending out really
really long pitches. We've seen.That's something that's mean, you know,
constant over the years. But thenon the flip side, too, we
see there are a lot of changes. It's a lot more concerned about the
lack of funding and trust in journalistIn journalism, about a third third of
(07:29):
journalists have major concerns there. Andand then you know a lot of new
things coming out with how they're usingnewer social networks, how they're thinking about
generative AI, et cetera. Well, and one of the things I thought
was interesting in your research that alot of times we don't really think about,
at least on the communicators side ofthings, is what the journalist's work
(07:51):
environment was. I mean, thewhen the pandemic hit, it fundamentally changed
things for a lot of us,but not necessarily for journalists. You know,
I think when you look at youknow, some of the findings from
your research, you know, youhad more than half a journalist say they
only want to go into the office. Sometimes sounds fairly, fairly familiar.
They're looking for high hybrid work arrangements. You know, some want flexibility because
(08:16):
they feel a little bit stuck inthe office. And the thing that continues
to be true today as it alwayswas was. Journalism really isn't a nine
to five job. So before weget to talk about some of those other
things, what just what are someof the challenges of the job And with
your research, why is that importantto really delve and understand what the journalist's
(08:37):
work environment is Like, Yeah,I think it matters a lot, especially
you know for a lot of thosein corporate communications, where it's I mean
you're hung people in corporate communications,they're working work in all hours too,
But you know, the construct thatbeing at a large company there's you can
get a feeling of a lot ofstability and you know, kind of more
(09:03):
predictable HR policies and when you gotto be in and what hours you got
to work. Whereas for the journals, since very chaotic where they're they're jumping
around jobs a lot, A lotof them are. You know, we're
seeing a trend towards being freelancers too. And then even to your point,
the ones that are at jobs arealways switching around beats what they're covering,
(09:24):
they're they're in the office a lotless. So I think it changes up
a lot of people's long time habitsand strategies. For example, you know,
we see there are a lot ofpeople who who grew up thinking,
okay, I got to call thejournalist desk line, and of course I
call that journalist desk line between nineto five, they'll probably pick up.
(09:46):
Now it's like, well they're youknow, they're working from home half the
time. Like they're probably not goingto be at that desk line, so
you don't have their cell phone numberof good luck or Another we see is
that people want to you the deathside tours where it's like, oh hey,
let me, you know, cometo your office and meet you.
And they might be like, well, I live an hour from the office
(10:09):
and I only want to go inonce a week, so I'm not going
to come in just to meet youthere. So there are a lot of
elements like that where we're seeing understanding, you know, where journalism is going
and how journalists are working really impactshow you think about building relationships with journalists.
Yeah. I've been in this professionfor thirty plus years, so I
(10:30):
guess I'm a bit of a dinosaur, and you took me back a little
bit there in terms of you know, time to call into the reporters.
I mean, I remember my firstagency job. When we would call reporters
tell them we were going to sendsomething, we would send it. We'd
wait three to five days for themail, and then we would call and
say, did you get that great, let's talk about setting up interviews.
(10:52):
And it's been it's been interesting tosee how the pace of everything is compressed.
I mean, new cycles have compressed, but the in the workloads I
think was finding. I think oneof the stats that you had in your
research that I thought was interesting wasnearly a quarter of journalists have to produce
eleven or more stories a week.That is a lot of content that needs
(11:16):
to be out there. And thefinding also said that about seventy percent I
guess number sixty nine percent say thework is primarily for online publications. How
does this sheer number of stories writingfor digital and then back through print and
others. How does that really impactthe way journalists do their job and even
(11:39):
just the way that legacy media thinksabout its format. Yeah, I think
that that real acceleration of the contentvolume the suspected the journalist changes a lot.
Where if a journalist is making thatmuch content, you really have to
make it easy for them to getthe story done. You've seen a lot
(12:00):
more focus on doing things like makingsure you have all the photography and the
media that we go along with thestory ready because a lot of times they're
not going to be able to sendout their own photographer like they could in
the old days, or you know, have the art department ready to do
it. Another is organizing all thestats of course. Another and you know
(12:22):
this is kind of an old basic, but just making sure that you have
your spokespeople available and really you know, fast turnaround to get journalists the information
they need. And I think,you know, kind of along that thought
process, the more you can kindof package up what the story is,
the more powerful it is for especiallyfor a journalists with that kind of volume.
(12:46):
I should say too, I thinkit's important to research with any given
journalists how many articles is that journalistright by looking at their portfolio, because
that dictates a lot because there arestill some journals out there that might be
feature writers and they do, youknow, one or two stories a month,
and the way you interact with thatjournalists it's probably gonna have to be
(13:07):
completely different than how you interact withthe journalists he's writing three or four stories
today, Yeah, that makes thatmakes a lot of sense. So yeah,
I mean it was interesting. Sixtyfour percent, based on your research,
you know, work more than fortyhours a week. About thirty six
percent reported layoffs or buyoffs of theircompany. Salaries aren't the greatest in the
(13:30):
world, so I guess, youknow, I guess part of the advice
is we certainly have to have someempathy because I've truly found that, you
know, most people that do journalismas a profession have a true love for
the craft of what they're doing,and we need to embrace and celebrate that
in our in our communications with them. Yeah, it's well said, it's
I mean, I guess low payin journalism isn't necessarily any anything new,
(13:56):
but I think it's coming to ayou know, most more challenging environment than
before in terms of the layoffs andthe lack of stability. So I think
now more than ever, people goinginto journalism it's a true calling. They're
not doing it for the money.So I think it's a great point that
it's a good time to you know, reflect on that. And I think,
(14:18):
you know, obviously there's somewhat ofan adversarial relationship inherent between journalists and
communicators. But I think I thinksometimes you know when you're any anytime you're
pitching, you know your risk thechallenger. The risk is like thinking only
about everything from your own perspective,where it's like, why aren't they getting
back to me? They owe mea response. I sent them this thoughtful
(14:41):
pitch. But then you just remember, like, hey, they're they're juggling
a million things and they're in thisvery unstable environment. And kind of I
think keeping that mindset and that attitude'sgood book for the journalists because you'll be
more you know, more empathetic andmore helpful. But I think also good
for the picture to not get scourageand not take things personally that aren't meant
(15:01):
to be personal. Yeah, thatmakes a lot of sense. I think
if we were to put a littlegift in here right now to do that,
I guess it would be like JerryMaguire, help me, help you,
right, be cognizant about that.Well, we couldn't have a podcast.
We couldn't have a discussion about commsand journalism without without the without talking
(15:24):
about AI. Right, those twowords, those two letters, I guess
I should say, are pretty prettymuch everywhere, and I thought it was.
There were some interesting things in yourresearch, and in a lot of
ways, I think journalism looking atthe adoption from AI is similar to what
we're seeing from a lot of otherprofessionals in the communications industry. According to
(15:46):
this year's Muckrack's research, about twentyeight percent of journalists report using the technology,
another twenty percent planned explore its uses. And there's definitely purest out there
that says, no, know,how you know, I'm going to stick
to the tried and true part ofit. So tell me a little bit
(16:06):
about what you're hearing about journalists thoughtabout generative AI and then also the use
of AI behind the scenes to kindof help put stories together and do the
research. Yeah, it's really interesting. So you know, I think it's
always good to separate, Like,you know, there's the philosophical debate is
(16:26):
AI good for journalism or you know, good for society, and then there's
the practical consideration like, hey,it's here, it's one click away to
anybody with an Internet connection, andwhat do we do about it? So
we've seen twenty in our survey,twenty eight percent of journalists report using AI
(16:48):
and twenty percent plan to explore whichto be honest, seems kind of low,
and I imagine that number will willtick up over time. We do
see, you know. I thinkwhen they say that they're they're reading it
in word to using it for writing, whereas fifty two percent say they're using
(17:11):
it for brainstorming and similar number forresearch. So I think it's something where
it's kind of like, you know. The way I think about it as
analogy is like before the spreadsheet cameout, if you want to run a
financial model, you had to dothe math on every single cell yourself,
and to do one, you know, to change one variable and a financial
(17:33):
model, you'd had to spend hoursgoing through the rest. And then the
spreadsheet came out. Now you canchange a variable and the rest calculates in
a in a you know, unnoticeablenanosecond and kind of similar, you know.
I think with generative AI for writing, it gives you a lot to
play with where you could say,hey, I want to change the style
(17:56):
of this take this article I wrote, give me an idea on how I
and cut it down from a thousandwords to five hundred words, or help
me translate it to the next languagethat we need to go after, or
let me play with fifty different headlineideas. So I think there's some element
where you know you responsibly and ultimatelywith the human reviewing it, you just
(18:17):
get a lot of leverage on yourtime, which I think could be a
great thing for journalists who are strappedfor time, and even you know,
simpler uses of AI, Like Iwas talking to a good friend of mine
who's a journalist, and she wastelling me that AI got her her nights
and weekends back simply because for herstories, she has to do a lot
(18:37):
of interviewing people on the phone,and she used to record it and then
spend her nights and weekends manually transcribingthose interviews, and now she has them
all transcribed by AI, so shedoesn't have to manually transcribe it at all.
She can still go back and listento the part she wants to quote
to make sure the transcription was accurate, but not having to transcribe the whole
(19:00):
thing just got our hours back inthe day, and now she can Jesus
she wants to have more of apersonal life or spend that time working on
more stories. So it's there area lot of powerful uses for it for
anyone who's in a profession that involvesa lot of writing and research, which
journalis definitely fall into. Yeah.One of the things I thought was what
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was surprising by your research? AndI guess it's because newsrooms are trying to
figure this out, same as companiesand college professors. But nearly sixty percent
of the interviewees in this year's surveyreport that their news room has no AI
use case policy. Well, onlytwenty four percent have one. I mean,
(19:48):
is that good? Is that bad? Does that mean we're enabling creative
freedom? Does that just mean wereally need to have a broader conversation about
ethics of AI. Did that numbersshock you in this year study, Yeah,
it did surprise me. I wouldhave thought that more newsrooms would have
a policy by now, you know, to be honest, I kind of
(20:10):
mix. I could see it cuteither way, because, like, it
definitely be better if one hundred percentof newsrooms had a good AI use policy,
But I think there's also a bigrisk in that if you do a
bad AI use policy, it couldbe worse because then you you know,
restrict the judgment of the journalists andyou could either be you know, too
(20:33):
liberal in the policy and say,yeah, just do you say I as
much as possible, and then itmight absolve the journals of their own feeling
of you know, ethics and responsibilityand that like they should really review everything
that the AI puts out and factcheck it and a bunch of other obvious
things, you know. But Ithink there's also a risk to being too
(20:53):
restrictive with AI, because the thingis like it's here, everybody else has
it, and there's nothing going tobe bad actors, you know, and
ethical people using AI to make aton of content on the web, and
that's already happening. So I thinkthat the journalists aren't using AI. The
(21:14):
good journalists out there aren't using AIto get more leverage to put out good,
accurate, responsible content. But withmore the extra leverage technology can bring
than they risk falling behind and letthe bad actors you know, dominate the
conversation. So, you know,I think, like any other new technology,
(21:36):
it can be used, you know, wisely or poorly, And there's
kind of responsibility in every profession andparticularly journalism, to you know, not
be too slow to adapt new technologiesand smart ways to advance what their profession's
meant to do. Yeah, thinkingabout policies or not. I think is
interesting. And and then that gotme in a little bit of a tank
(22:00):
when I heard you thinking, Sopicture this cage match AI reporter versus human
reporter. Who wins? And why? Yeah? I think with that,
you know, I think there'd bea third winner, the human who uses
AI, because on one hand,you know, the AI only reporter wouldn't
(22:22):
have as much you know, wouldn'twouldn't have the judgment, wouldn't have access
to all the facts. Can't justyou know, network and call up a
source and do all the or atleast not yet, but you know,
do a lot of the work thatyou know is required to do good journalism.
And I think also, you know, part of what makes the journalism
good is that someone trusts the personwho writes it. So I think a
(22:45):
lot of people would be suspect ofwhat you know comes out from AI,
even if it happened to be accurate. But then again, you know,
the journalist who today is not usingAI would be wasting a lot of reps
compared to theoernals who is using AI. So just for like that very simple
example, let's say you know youhave journals, say journals B. Journalis
(23:07):
say now has to spend two hourstranscribing the injuries they did this morning.
Journalis B has already used AI totranscribe them and is writing the story.
Well, you know, journalist bejust scoop. Journalists say, simply by
having AI you know, transcribed forthem much less, you know, maybe
help brainstorm some some headline ideas,or to do some proof checking, or
(23:32):
help help them figure out which paragraphto cut. So so I think,
you know, when you when youthink of examples like that, it's clear
that the person using EYE is gonnakind of beat the person not using AI,
and there is a way they coulddo it, like in the example
I gave where you're probably not reallysacrificing any quality and accuracy. That said,
you know, there's a risk yougo too far using AI if you
(23:55):
have journalists see who's like, youknow what, I'm just gonna have AI
right the whole story. I'm goingto spend ten minutes looking it over for
tone, and I'm going to publishit. Well, there's a good chance
in the journal seat publishes something that'stotally inaccurate and they ruin their own credibility
or maybe open themselves up with alot reliabiliss lawsuits. So you know,
(24:15):
I think I think on middle roadwhere it's like, how do you leverage
the technology but not go overboard withit? You know, maybe an analogy
would be if you can imagine whencars first came out, right, It's
like, if you had the carand you had to go, you know,
get somewhere fifty miles away, you'llyou'll definitely beat the person with the
horse or the runner. But youknow, if you floor the car and
(24:37):
you don't maintain it, like there'sa good chance to a crash on the
way, and then you know theperson on the horse or even somebody just
walking will beat you because you'll you'llbe off preparing your car. So I
think it's you know, it's findingthat right way to use the technology to
get to where you want to go. Yeah, I think I agree with
you on that. I think Ithink that's a really good analogy. And
(24:59):
then going back to my very poorcage analogy, you know, the journalist
leveraging AI jumping in with the chairis going to dominate there. But I
do agree it's a middle ground andit'll be interesting to see how it evolves.
Because like you were talking about thehuman perspective, to curate, to
bring different things together, at leastat this point, to understand how to
(25:23):
capture emotion in a way that AIdoesn't, I think is going to be
really compelling. That And then alsoI think particularly you know with beat reporters
or trade reporters, you know there'ssomething innate in kind of their spidy senses
that they pick up. Having workedso deeply in these industries, having talked
(25:44):
to so many different experts in thefield, I think that becomes very,
very hard when you get into areal granular level to do on an AI.
You can get about eighty percent there, but it's a lot of times
it's that final fifteen to twenty percentthat makes a difference between a good article
and a great article. And Ithink that perspective really comes in. So
(26:07):
part of your research also then lookedat social media use, and you had
that more than half a journalist saysocial media is important or very important in
how they do their job, andX continues to dominate among journalists. Why
do you think that that's the case? Network effects are really powerful, So
(26:30):
you go somewhere where everyone else is, you know, they're going to be
there, there's some new place,and you can't count on everyone being there.
You don't have it. So Ithink there's a lot of journalists who
are dissatisfied with ACTS and you know, it's being used relatively, you know,
(26:52):
we have seen or reduction in usecompared to what it used to be
in the days when it was calledTwitter, but it's still by far the
dominant platform. And as much aspeople have thought about going elsewhere, there's
no clear other place to go.You know, some people have gone to
(27:12):
threads or blue Sky, but it'snot clear like is that the place to
be, And there just aren't asmany other people on there. So you
write something there, it's not goingto get as much engagement as it will
on X for the most part,and I think there is you know,
a certain immediacy to X, youknow. And another thing is that other
(27:36):
platforms, like they've seen, havingnews on your platform from the perspective of
social network is a big headache becauseno matter what you do, you're going
to get accused of biasing, youknow, one side or the other with
your algorithms, and someone will postsomething controversial and then you have to decide
if you want to take it downor not. And you have to worry
(28:00):
about a lot of advertisers who don'tlike the idea that, you know,
something might not be brand safe.You know, it's unfortunately often means news.
You know, it's has heard alot of news publishers on their own
websites, which is kind of collateraldamage, I think, unfortunately. So
so in a way, it's likethese other social networks like winning the news
(28:25):
game. Even if they could winit, it wouldn't serve their greater interests,
whereas x FK. Twitter has alwaysbeen all about the news, or
at least that's been a big partof it because it was the first social
platform to have immediacy and just thatinstant access, and it just has such
a history there that that I thinkit's gonna you know, preserve it spot
(28:52):
with that. And that's why wesee eighty one percent of journalists planned to
stay on That's this this year.So, you know, regardless of what
you think about it all, it'sso where it's all happened. Yeah,
And I had a friend of minewho writes for the Chicago Tribune and and
you know, she was saying,hey, you know, there's the immediate,
(29:12):
and then there's kind of the accurate, right, and so platforms like
Twitter and my point is you wantto be as accurate as possible, but
that allows you to get that immediacyto get out there, to start getting
ahead of the story. But thenyou've got the ability as you go into
the longer form of content, intothe online versions and then ultimately the features,
(29:33):
you know, to start with thenugget of news and see how it
comes out. But it's I thinkwe've seen time and time again love Twitter
or hate Twitter when something's happening orbreaking, where do people go first?
Right? Because that is that senseof immediacy that comes out, and then
the ability to build stories after that, to adjust correct facts as needed.
And that's been really interesting to lookat its effect on journalism and that as
(29:59):
an opp and your research showed otherplatforms, we don't want you to not
feel the love. They go toLinkedIn, they look at other things.
But I think when you were talkingabout, you know, the network effect
and really the immediacy of the feed, I think that's continued to give X
a bit of an advantage. Sowhy don't we switch switch a little bit
and let's talk a little bit aboutthe other side. Let's talk about the
(30:22):
corporate communicators, the agency sides,how we interact. I think as we've
talked so far, we've covered thatjournalists are really strapped. They've got to
put a lot of stories out.They got a lot of pressure. They're
trying to figure out where all thesethings come. How you mind this information?
And then you get the endless glut, the sea of pitches. You
(30:45):
know, many may not even berelevant to the journalists coming in. So
we're we're going to explore that alittle bit. But there was one stat
I found fascinating from this year's study. It actually surprised me. So most
journalists think that PR pros are importantto their success. And I thought that
maybe like a plurality or something likethat, But seventy percent of journalists say
(31:11):
PR pros are either important or veryimportant to their success. Why is that,
greg And then you feel the love, Yeah, it's yeah. I
think it's a surprising stat to alot because journalists are always complaining about how
many pitches they get and PR pros. But I think it is, you
know, reminded of deep down,like the journalists need sources, they need
(31:34):
to get accurate info and PR PRpros are their best friends for that.
And we see a lot of journalistsdo leverage the PR community, you know,
both to get story ideas because oftenthose PR people are in the rooms
where decisions are getting made and theysee the see the trends before anybody else.
(31:56):
And then also his stories are comingtogether. If there's a PR per
in the mix, there's someone toquickly send the headshot and the bio and
the uh you know, get thephoto they need, or dig up a
staff that they need in a waythat if you're only talking to executives at
a company, you know you're goingto be priority number four or five rather
than priority number one. So Ithink and I think that should be heartening
(32:21):
and that, you know, asmuch as a lot of people find,
hey, this pitch is getting ignoredor it's hard to break through, it
shows that if you do your jobright, you'll be viewed as a real
positive, as an asset. Youknow, you're not just you know,
just someone who's getting in someone someoneelse's way, And that shows you know,
when you do it right, youcan really excel in form deep relationships.
(32:45):
Yeah, and I think again oneof the big topics that's really coming
up as we talk today is likerelevance and so I mean for my UH,
for my corporate comes and UH anagency brethren, that's an ex staff.
That's seventy percent of journalists say theyneed us to help them do their
job, to provide context, togive access to experts in those type of
(33:08):
things. But yet the numbers arealso high when they get spammed. If
you spam a journalist, you're gonnaget ignored. About forty nine percent say
they, you know, respond topitches seldom to never. So if you're
not relevant, you know, don'texpect the courtesy. Hey, thanks for
sending me something that's completely off target. Despite low response rates, pitches still
(33:35):
come in. You have forty sixpercent of journalists receive six or more pitches
per day. That's more than thirtypitches per week. You know, probably
for some reporters they may get thirtypitches an hour for all, for all
I know. But the main reasonsjournalists reject pitches or don't give response is
if it's not relevant, if it'sjust if it's just a mass blast on
(33:59):
something. So Greg, maybe youcan talk a little bit about that and
then maybe that becomes a good avenuefor us to talk about how you guys
work at muckrack to help make surethat those that are using a tool are
being as relevant and useful as possibleto journalists. Yeah, we see that,
you know, when it comes topitching, I think it's really essential
(34:22):
to customize every single email you're sendingout and look at over when we I
mean, the reason we started muckrackone of them when we launched the part
for the PR community. We sawat the time you know that, you
know, I guess ten plus yearsago the status quo as you just say,
hey, I'm launching a tech product. Let me look up every tech
(34:45):
journalists, send you know, anemail to five hundred one thousand tech journalists.
Here's a new tech product. Andthen of course, you know,
tons of it's not relevant because you'reyou know, someone might write only about
B to B software and you're comingout with consumer piece of hardware, you
know, just a million other thingswhere you know if you spent the second
on it that that journals will nevercover it. So that's where we're really
(35:07):
big on figuring out, like,hey, look look at what the journalist
has actually written and tweeted about andotherwise create a content on and use that
to figure out the right journalists toget to contact. And then instead of
pitching five hundred journalists, pitch fivejournals in your first round, And if
(35:28):
you're only pitching five, you canput a tremendous amount of effort into each
pitch, how to frame it,researching the journals, connect with them on
social, kind of go all outthere. So I think that's a really
powerful opportunity. And then we've beenexcited we've been able to add on to
that with AI now where we launchthis new feature with our media lists.
(35:50):
So if you have a media list, it'll suggest new journals to add to
that media list based on who's alreadyon there. Kind of like if you've
used well, going back to ourearlier conversation about music, if you Spotify,
you set up a playlist and itsays, hey, you know,
you got these twenty songs on theplaylist, here's a few more you might
want to add based on those songs. It's that same concepts, So it's
(36:14):
like coming up with very targeted lists. But now I think but I can
also help you know, like,hey, who's maybe a couple of people
that you didn't think of that,you should start thinking about too, to
go after in a very creative way. Yeah, and and I think I
think that's that's great advice. Imean, there's obviously those journalists you're going
to have personal relationships with that aslong as you're giving them relevant information,
(36:37):
are going to help. But butthere's other there's other times when you're not
going to have that existing relationship,and that relevance I think is key.
And in some of your some ofyour research, and again I would recommend
everybody go to www. Dot muckrackdot com. That's where you can find
the latest research. Actually you canfind research for multiple years going back,
(37:00):
guys summed up kind of what youdescribed as the elements of the perfect pitch.
So let me just give a coupleof those stats here, because I
do think it's really important for thatrelevance. Eighty three percent of journalists to
be pitched via one on one email. So while you want to put stuff
out there and social and all ofthat, it's really about that personal connection
(37:22):
of the one on one email.As we talked earlier, it's not a
nine to five, five day aweek job. So sixty four percent of
journalists don't care which day of theweek they are pitched, and twenty two
percent prefer Monday. But it's notlike the old schedule of here's your window,
here's your time, here's your day. But people don't want to be
(37:44):
pinged at three o'clock in the morningtheir local time. And I stress that
media relations is often global. Don'tjust use a US centric time zone view
of the world. Forty four percentwant to receive pitches before noon on their
time. They want us to beconcise. Sixty five percent prefer pitches that
(38:04):
are under two hundred words and don'tsend wait an hour and be like,
oh my gosh, Greg hasn't gottenback to me. Did he get it?
Did he not get it? Fiftyone percent of journalists say follow up
is ideal, really when you're thinkingabout three to seven days later, So
to give me time to process thisand come back when you're relevant. Anything
else there on the perfect pitch oragain, how you guys have kind of
(38:28):
perfected your own algorithm to help communicationsprofessionals not just find the right journalists,
but kind of time their pitch trackcoverage. How are you taking all of
these insights and applying them into thetool. Yeah, well, we've really
focused on getting like the workflows justright, so figuring out, like Cay,
if you have a whole bunch ofjournalists you might want to talk to,
(38:52):
how do you narrow it down tojust the right journalists? Then how
do you tailor the pitch to beperfect for each one? And that's where
we really focused on. Having theworkflows so it's easy to start with your
template of the facts you know youneed to get out to everybody, but
then have a view where you cansee every journalist who want to pitch,
(39:13):
customize exactly what you want to sayto each person. While you're customizing it,
having access to all the context onthat journal it's that you need to
have, and then being able toconnect that with your inbox send it.
Another key thing that we've really focusedon too is building a CRM so that
you can track all those conversations andmake it available only to your team in
(39:36):
an encrypted way, which is reallypowerful because we find what happens, especially
now in the age remote work,you have an in house corporate coms team
or a PR agency, everybody's busy, everyone's pitching all the time, and
then you know it happens. Youdon't realize that you're about to pitch someone
that you're colleague pitched two hours agoand it's going to look unprofessional, or
(39:57):
you know you're going to pitch someonecold, but it turns out your worker
knows that person really well, andif you'd only known, you do much
better off getting a friendly intro.So by having that shared source of knowledge
in the CRM, we really helpour customers like no, like, what's
the total context on this relationship versusjust thinking of each pitches. It's so
(40:17):
on transaction. Yeah, that makesa lot of sense. So as you
make life easier for journalists by managingthe flow bringing their spam down, do
you get a lot of really goodbirthday presence as Hey, Greg, thanks
for thanks for getting my pitch isa little more focused focused to me.
Yeah, I don't know how manyof our customers know no my birthday,
(40:39):
but it is a treat. WheneverI go to an industry conference and I
meet some people who've been using thesoftware, I've got a lot of people
who just say, Hey, thetech we've done is giving them their Friday
back because they used to have todo a ton of kind of copy and
pasting and now now we do itor got them a raise or a promotion
because they got that article that theywant. And for me, that's always
(41:02):
the most gratifying part because I canlook at we have lots of usage data
and I can look at the aggregatestats on how many tens of thousands of
people are logging me in every dayand how active they are, But that
the never compares is you know,meeting an actual human one on one where
our software is helped. For me, that's always the most motivating part of
(41:22):
the job. Yeah, and it'sagain I think what's so fascinating and powerful
And while you guys have seen somuch growth in your model is that it's
been grounded and kind of like,even though it's serving the PR community,
it's really grounded in journalists first kindof mindset, which I think is really
important. And you talked about theworkflows and the process. You know,
(41:45):
maybe we can talk about AI andin a little bit different way before we
wrap here, not generative AI,but machine learning and how you've tapped that
at at muck rack. I mean, can you can you explain for our
listeners a little bit what is anuance between machine learning and generative AI,
and and how does that help youcontinue to one better serve journalists and PR
(42:09):
professionals, but just continue to innovateand evolve as Mark Rack. Yeah,
it's a great, great point,and I think it's important to you know,
go into a language and our like. AI is a very general term
that encompasses both. You know,one type of AIS machine learning. Another
(42:29):
type of AI is generative AI.And we've been using machine learning for you
know, almost since the inception ofMark Rack, you know, well over
a decade or fifteen years old nowto do things like analyze articles, figure
out who wrote the article, asthe sentiment positive or negative. You know,
(42:50):
you know when the article is written, and all this stuff sounds simple,
but when you apply it, weare processing millions of articles every day.
You know, some we get instructuredformats from licensing deals we have and
you know, special data pipes wehave from publishers. But you know,
some of the content might just beyou know, some blog that started a
(43:10):
week ago, and we have toyou know, our technology needs to figure
out what's going on there in avery unstructured way. So we brought machine
learning to bear for a long timeto solve those problems for our customers.
And then more recently in the lastyear we've added a lot of generative AI
functionality with presspal Ai. We justlaunched our AI powered word clouds this week
(43:35):
so that customers can put together reallyadvanced word clouds in real time on all
the coveries that they're getting. Andthat's where you know, both you know,
using this combination of machine learning insome cases generative in another case,
I can really push to sell professionforward and we're excited about the role we
have to play in it. Oh, I love me a good word cloud.
(43:58):
I'm glad that you guys are provingthat because as simple as it sounds,
if you get the algorithm right topop things like that, it really
does tell a really powerful story interms of what you're looking at and seeing.
So that's great kind of the applicationof machine learning, and just the
continued iteration that you've done since sincetwo thousand and nine has been amazing.
(44:23):
One last question before we kind ofwrap here, Greg So and I forgot
to point out earlier the research thatyou did was global. It's not just
US base. You travel quite alot globally, meeting with members of the
industry, members of the media,maybe you can offer a little bit of
a different perspective. Are the trendsthat we're seeing here in North America?
(44:45):
Are you seeing very similar things globallyor are you hearing anything different as you
talk to communicators and journalists around theglobe. I think the trends are global.
I think a lot of stuff happensfirst here before at least it gets
(45:06):
to the UK and Europe. Sosometimes you can kind of see a bit
of dispair, and sometimes it goesthe other way too. So I think
the old line, I think itwas asthmth you said it, like the
future is here, it's just notevenly distributed. It's definitely true with journalism
and pr two that you can lookto some countries and see they've pushed further
(45:28):
ahead with digital, whereas others there'shavings as much, which I think is
a great reason to travel and torun global enterprises and to talk connect with
colleagues in other countries, because we'vegot lots of great ideas both, some
ideas that might push you forward andbe like, oh, they're trying that
there, we should try that heretoo, And sometimes other times we were
(45:49):
like oh wait, we're you know, trying this thing here, but we
can't count on somebody in another countryalready being as far along with that,
so we're going to have to slowdown in that market and figure out it
out. So it's always just somethingI find really really fascinating. And the
fun thing about pr and journalism isthat's your global whether or not you want
(46:09):
to be. Because you might bea company that only operates in you know,
one city in the US, butif somebody writes about you who's based
in London or even you know,on the other side of the world in
Australia, your next door neighbor mightsee that article and not come to your
store decide to come to your storebecause of that. So there's there's this
(46:31):
element where, you you know,even if your neighborhood coffee shop, you
kind of have to worry about theglobal media environment because things can travel from
one end of the world to anotherin a millisecond. Yeah, that is
so true. So this has beenan absolute fascinating discussion. I would invite
all of our listeners to UH toagain visit muckrac dot com, where you
(46:53):
can learn more about the platform andtheir resources. You've got all the re
search. I'd also encourage you toreach out to Greg. He travels the
globe, He's talking to everybody,and if you find him on social media,
he tends to be first name ona lot of these platforms, so
he's easy to find from that standpoint. And you know, as we think
(47:17):
about our discussion here today, Imean it really starts with bringing a journalists
first point of view, Greg,as you talked about just the founding of
muckrach and what's been so powerful isstarting with that journalist's point of view,
understanding what their workload is, whattheir need, what their challenge is,
having a little bit of empathy.We had a great discussion about the cage
(47:39):
match AI reporter versus human reporter,and I think our answer is kind of
the cyborg hybrid of both is probablyyou know, one of the strongest there.
And we talked about the importance ofX still being a big news source
from the network effect, and thenwe talked about really the importance of having
(48:01):
a tailored, timely pitch that's relevantand how you can use something like muck
rack to make sure you're being reallyrelevant. What did I miss? Greg?
Any any final thoughts before we closehere, any words of advice to
the comms professionals out there. Ithink that's a great summary. I'd say
just check out before report, cometo mycrack dot com and you can all
(48:24):
read it for yourself. And we'realways coming out with you features, so
keep watching the space. Greg.It's always a pleasure to talk to you.
I'm always always inspired to see whatit is that you're coming up next.
I could talk to you for hoursabout those type of things. Thank
you so much for joining us onthe podcast, and thank you listeners for
(48:45):
tuning in. Drop us a linewith your thoughts on today's episode, and
check back soon for the latest episodesof Building Brand Gravity. I'm Steve Halsey,
your host. Thank you for joiningme and Greg, thanks again for
joining Building Brand Gravity. Great.Thanks you, Steve, you will.
We are GNS Business Communications. Weare a team of media strategists, storytellers,
(49:09):
and engagement experts who meet you atthe intersection of business and communications.
To learn more, visit gscommunications dotcom. You're listening to Building Brand Gravity
Attracting people into your Orbit, aGNS Business Communications podcast. Keep connected with
(49:29):
us by subscribing to the show inyour favorite podcast player. If you like
what you've heard, please rate theshow that helps us to keep delivering the
latest in industry influence. Thanks forlistening, Until next time.
You are listening to Building Brand GravityAttracting People into Your Orbit, a GNS
business communications podcast. This is ashow for communications pros across industries looking to
gain an inside of you into industryinfluence. You're about to hear a conversation
with leading industry professionals talking about theimportance of building business impact through sound brand
(00:31):
strategy. Let's get into the show. Hello, I'm Steve Halsey, one
of your hosts of Building Brand Gravity. Did you know that a lack of
funding and trust in journalism are twoof the top concerns of journalists. This
is followed closely by concerns about disinformation. These are some of the findings of
(00:51):
the latest industry research by Muckrack.Muckrack is an all in one public relations
management platform that was developed to helppr professional better managed media relations, glean
insights from more than a thousand journalists, and just really allow them to be
more effective at what they do.We're joined here today by Greg Galant,
(01:11):
who is co founder and CEO ofMuckrach, who's going to give us insights
on these latest trends and take usinto the world of media. It's going
to be really exciting we're going tobe talking about how journalist works, how
AI and social media are impacting whatthey do, and we're else going to
talk about what does and doesn't work, about pitching media in today's environment,
(01:32):
and much much more so. Greg, welcome to the show. Great,
Thanks Steve, thank you for havingme on. Yeah, it's really exciting.
You know, you've you've been quitethe entrepreneur over your time, launching
your first company at fourteen years old, starting your first podcast out of college
called Venture Voice, working with CNNwith you really took me back there.
(01:53):
What when we used to call itcitizen journalism? That was pretty wild looking
at the trends as that came up, helped launch a number of technology ventures,
one of my favorite, the ShortyAwards. You were behind helping create
that for social media, and ofcourse you changed the world a little bit
(02:14):
in two thousand and nine when youco founded muckrack, and that's gone through
a lot of iterations ever since.So can you tell us a little bit
about the founding of muckrack, whatwas really kind of behind that, and
then as part of that, howcome you felt has been important to publish
his annual State of Journalism report formany years now, sure, so funny
(02:36):
enough, I'll started with podcasting.So when I started my podcast interviewing entrepreneurs
about how they got started in twothousand and five, that was like the
first. Now that's a common formatfor a podcast. That was the first
podcast of its kind. So Ithought, okay, let me experiment with
this new podcast medium. Being anentrepreneur, I thought would be cool.
(02:59):
I just talked to other spreneurs andlearn from them, and I got some
amazing guests on I had Reid Hoffmannback when the founder of LinkedIn, back
when LinkedIn still had just fifty employees, the founder of Yelp. I got
John Bogel, the founder of thebandguard Group, an inventor of the Index
Fund. Just some amazing people tobe able to interview and learn from.
(03:21):
One of the people I had onmy podcast was ev Williams, who had
the startup called Oudio. She wasmeant to be a podcast directory and discovery
platform. Odio never worked out,but I watched him pivot to a little
side project that he had called Twitter. So that led me to sign up
for Twitter way early. I gotmy first name on there, just at
(03:43):
Gregory on Twitter, and still haveit, and I later got at Gregory
on Instagram too, just by beingthe first first month to sign up at
least with that name, and sokind of seeing that early social media world.
You know, this is around likeprobably like six I signed up,
and then you know, by liketwo thousand and eight, I realized like,
(04:03):
hey, there's no way to figureout who's worth paying attention to on
social So that led to the ideato launch the Shorty Awards along with my
co founder lese Emol. And thenafter we saw that the Shorty Awards were
really really took off and we gota ton of attention and press covers.
(04:24):
The New York Times, Wall StreetJournal, BBC all reached out to us
to cover it that first year.So we're like, oh, that's interesting,
Like these journalists are using social mediato figure out what to write about.
They're all on social media, andthere's so much just generally digital data
about the journalists you could use tofigure you know, to kind of get
a sense of what's going on inthe world. So that all led to
(04:46):
the idea to launch the first versionof Mark Rack and O nine. And
originally actually it wasn't for pr people. It's just for journalists. It's totally
free. We launched it for journalists. We had over ten thousand journalists requests
to get on there in the firstyear, because they want to have profiles
on the web, they want tohave portfolios, they wanted to find each
other. It was a public website, and I'd keep running into PR people
(05:11):
who would all tell me like,oh, you do muckrack, Like I
love that website. I'm using itto figure out who I should pitch,
who I should talk to, whichjournalists I should care about. She realized
like, oh, that's interesting.It seems like a great business opportunity here
for this market. That's kind ofstart for data to know, like who
should they be talking to, howshould they be reaching out the journalists.
(05:32):
So that led us to relaunch muckrackin twenty eleven. We kept it all
free for journalists and still is today. But then we added the whole platform
for the PR and corporate communications worldto be able to log in, find
the very journals to pitch, monitorthe news, build reports, track the
relationships, show how the journal's relationshipsimpact the coverage that they get. And
(05:57):
we've been on that journey ever since. Wow, so so a German idea,
some serendipity and here you are.And part of that is, you
know, I think one of thethings that really differentiates what you're doing,
and a lot of that goes tothe original DNA is you've just talked about
of really understanding what's on journalists minds, what's in their world. And I'm
(06:20):
assuming that's part of the reason whyyou've done this Annual State of Journalism,
what you're seeing and some broader trends. So maybe you could talk a little
bit about what was kind of theinspiration to really putting out to the world
what journalists are seeing it And beforewe get into this year's study, have
you seen any broader trends over thenumber of years you've been doing your annual
(06:43):
report, any particular changes in theway that journalists work or what they're looking
for. Yeah, so we're seeingyou know, a lot of It's interesting,
like a lot of things change,a lot of things stay the same.
You know. One of the thingswe've found kind of consistently is that
journalists are you know, always lookingfor short, really tailored pitches, whereas
(07:06):
I think a lot of people tendto, you know, sending out really
really long pitches. We've seen.That's something that's mean, you know,
constant over the years. But thenon the flip side, too, we
see there are a lot of changes. It's a lot more concerned about the
lack of funding and trust in journalistIn journalism, about a third third of
(07:29):
journalists have major concerns there. Andand then you know a lot of new
things coming out with how they're usingnewer social networks, how they're thinking about
generative AI, et cetera. Well, and one of the things I thought
was interesting in your research that alot of times we don't really think about,
at least on the communicators side ofthings, is what the journalist's work
(07:51):
environment was. I mean, thewhen the pandemic hit, it fundamentally changed
things for a lot of us,but not necessarily for journalists. You know,
I think when you look at youknow, some of the findings from
your research, you know, youhad more than half a journalist say they
only want to go into the office. Sometimes sounds fairly, fairly familiar.
They're looking for high hybrid work arrangements. You know, some want flexibility because
(08:16):
they feel a little bit stuck inthe office. And the thing that continues
to be true today as it alwayswas was. Journalism really isn't a nine
to five job. So before weget to talk about some of those other
things, what just what are someof the challenges of the job And with
your research, why is that importantto really delve and understand what the journalist's
(08:37):
work environment is Like, Yeah,I think it matters a lot, especially
you know for a lot of thosein corporate communications, where it's I mean
you're hung people in corporate communications,they're working work in all hours too,
But you know, the construct thatbeing at a large company there's you can
get a feeling of a lot ofstability and you know, kind of more
(09:03):
predictable HR policies and when you gotto be in and what hours you got
to work. Whereas for the journals, since very chaotic where they're they're jumping
around jobs a lot, A lotof them are. You know, we're
seeing a trend towards being freelancers too. And then even to your point,
the ones that are at jobs arealways switching around beats what they're covering,
(09:24):
they're they're in the office a lotless. So I think it changes up
a lot of people's long time habitsand strategies. For example, you know,
we see there are a lot ofpeople who who grew up thinking,
okay, I got to call thejournalist desk line, and of course I
call that journalist desk line between nineto five, they'll probably pick up.
(09:46):
Now it's like, well they're youknow, they're working from home half the
time. Like they're probably not goingto be at that desk line, so
you don't have their cell phone numberof good luck or Another we see is
that people want to you the deathside tours where it's like, oh hey,
let me, you know, cometo your office and meet you.
And they might be like, well, I live an hour from the office
(10:09):
and I only want to go inonce a week, so I'm not going
to come in just to meet youthere. So there are a lot of
elements like that where we're seeing understanding, you know, where journalism is going
and how journalists are working really impactshow you think about building relationships with journalists.
Yeah. I've been in this professionfor thirty plus years, so I
(10:30):
guess I'm a bit of a dinosaur, and you took me back a little
bit there in terms of you know, time to call into the reporters.
I mean, I remember my firstagency job. When we would call reporters
tell them we were going to sendsomething, we would send it. We'd
wait three to five days for themail, and then we would call and
say, did you get that great, let's talk about setting up interviews.
(10:52):
And it's been it's been interesting tosee how the pace of everything is compressed.
I mean, new cycles have compressed, but the in the workloads I
think was finding. I think oneof the stats that you had in your
research that I thought was interesting wasnearly a quarter of journalists have to produce
eleven or more stories a week.That is a lot of content that needs
(11:16):
to be out there. And thefinding also said that about seventy percent I
guess number sixty nine percent say thework is primarily for online publications. How
does this sheer number of stories writingfor digital and then back through print and
others. How does that really impactthe way journalists do their job and even
(11:39):
just the way that legacy media thinksabout its format. Yeah, I think
that that real acceleration of the contentvolume the suspected the journalist changes a lot.
Where if a journalist is making thatmuch content, you really have to
make it easy for them to getthe story done. You've seen a lot
(12:00):
more focus on doing things like makingsure you have all the photography and the
media that we go along with thestory ready because a lot of times they're
not going to be able to sendout their own photographer like they could in
the old days, or you know, have the art department ready to do
it. Another is organizing all thestats of course. Another and you know
(12:22):
this is kind of an old basic, but just making sure that you have
your spokespeople available and really you know, fast turnaround to get journalists the information
they need. And I think,you know, kind of along that thought
process, the more you can kindof package up what the story is,
the more powerful it is for especiallyfor a journalists with that kind of volume.
(12:46):
I should say too, I thinkit's important to research with any given
journalists how many articles is that journalistright by looking at their portfolio, because
that dictates a lot because there arestill some journals out there that might be
feature writers and they do, youknow, one or two stories a month,
and the way you interact with thatjournalists it's probably gonna have to be
(13:07):
completely different than how you interact withthe journalists he's writing three or four stories
today, Yeah, that makes thatmakes a lot of sense. So yeah,
I mean it was interesting. Sixtyfour percent, based on your research,
you know, work more than fortyhours a week. About thirty six
percent reported layoffs or buyoffs of theircompany. Salaries aren't the greatest in the
(13:30):
world, so I guess, youknow, I guess part of the advice
is we certainly have to have someempathy because I've truly found that, you
know, most people that do journalismas a profession have a true love for
the craft of what they're doing,and we need to embrace and celebrate that
in our in our communications with them. Yeah, it's well said, it's
I mean, I guess low payin journalism isn't necessarily any anything new,
(13:56):
but I think it's coming to ayou know, most more challenging environment than
before in terms of the layoffs andthe lack of stability. So I think
now more than ever, people goinginto journalism it's a true calling. They're
not doing it for the money.So I think it's a great point that
it's a good time to you know, reflect on that. And I think,
(14:18):
you know, obviously there's somewhat ofan adversarial relationship inherent between journalists and
communicators. But I think I thinksometimes you know when you're any anytime you're
pitching, you know your risk thechallenger. The risk is like thinking only
about everything from your own perspective,where it's like, why aren't they getting
back to me? They owe mea response. I sent them this thoughtful
(14:41):
pitch. But then you just remember, like, hey, they're they're juggling
a million things and they're in thisvery unstable environment. And kind of I
think keeping that mindset and that attitude'sgood book for the journalists because you'll be
more you know, more empathetic andmore helpful. But I think also good
for the picture to not get scourageand not take things personally that aren't meant
(15:01):
to be personal. Yeah, thatmakes a lot of sense. I think
if we were to put a littlegift in here right now to do that,
I guess it would be like JerryMaguire, help me, help you,
right, be cognizant about that.Well, we couldn't have a podcast.
We couldn't have a discussion about commsand journalism without without the without talking
(15:24):
about AI. Right, those twowords, those two letters, I guess
I should say, are pretty prettymuch everywhere, and I thought it was.
There were some interesting things in yourresearch, and in a lot of
ways, I think journalism looking atthe adoption from AI is similar to what
we're seeing from a lot of otherprofessionals in the communications industry. According to
(15:46):
this year's Muckrack's research, about twentyeight percent of journalists report using the technology,
another twenty percent planned explore its uses. And there's definitely purest out there
that says, no, know,how you know, I'm going to stick
to the tried and true part ofit. So tell me a little bit
(16:06):
about what you're hearing about journalists thoughtabout generative AI and then also the use
of AI behind the scenes to kindof help put stories together and do the
research. Yeah, it's really interesting. So you know, I think it's
always good to separate, Like,you know, there's the philosophical debate is
(16:26):
AI good for journalism or you know, good for society, and then there's
the practical consideration like, hey,it's here, it's one click away to
anybody with an Internet connection, andwhat do we do about it? So
we've seen twenty in our survey,twenty eight percent of journalists report using AI
(16:48):
and twenty percent plan to explore whichto be honest, seems kind of low,
and I imagine that number will willtick up over time. We do
see, you know. I thinkwhen they say that they're they're reading it
in word to using it for writing, whereas fifty two percent say they're using
(17:11):
it for brainstorming and similar number forresearch. So I think it's something where
it's kind of like, you know. The way I think about it as
analogy is like before the spreadsheet cameout, if you want to run a
financial model, you had to dothe math on every single cell yourself,
and to do one, you know, to change one variable and a financial
(17:33):
model, you'd had to spend hoursgoing through the rest. And then the
spreadsheet came out. Now you canchange a variable and the rest calculates in
a in a you know, unnoticeablenanosecond and kind of similar, you know.
I think with generative AI for writing, it gives you a lot to
play with where you could say,hey, I want to change the style
(17:56):
of this take this article I wrote, give me an idea on how I
and cut it down from a thousandwords to five hundred words, or help
me translate it to the next languagethat we need to go after, or
let me play with fifty different headlineideas. So I think there's some element
where you know you responsibly and ultimatelywith the human reviewing it, you just
(18:17):
get a lot of leverage on yourtime, which I think could be a
great thing for journalists who are strappedfor time, and even you know,
simpler uses of AI, Like Iwas talking to a good friend of mine
who's a journalist, and she wastelling me that AI got her her nights
and weekends back simply because for herstories, she has to do a lot
(18:37):
of interviewing people on the phone,and she used to record it and then
spend her nights and weekends manually transcribingthose interviews, and now she has them
all transcribed by AI, so shedoesn't have to manually transcribe it at all.
She can still go back and listento the part she wants to quote
to make sure the transcription was accurate, but not having to transcribe the whole
(19:00):
thing just got our hours back inthe day, and now she can Jesus
she wants to have more of apersonal life or spend that time working on
more stories. So it's there area lot of powerful uses for it for
anyone who's in a profession that involvesa lot of writing and research, which
journalis definitely fall into. Yeah.One of the things I thought was what
(19:23):
was surprising by your research? AndI guess it's because newsrooms are trying to
figure this out, same as companiesand college professors. But nearly sixty percent
of the interviewees in this year's surveyreport that their news room has no AI
use case policy. Well, onlytwenty four percent have one. I mean,
(19:48):
is that good? Is that bad? Does that mean we're enabling creative
freedom? Does that just mean wereally need to have a broader conversation about
ethics of AI. Did that numbersshock you in this year study, Yeah,
it did surprise me. I wouldhave thought that more newsrooms would have
a policy by now, you know, to be honest, I kind of
(20:10):
mix. I could see it cuteither way, because, like, it
definitely be better if one hundred percentof newsrooms had a good AI use policy,
But I think there's also a bigrisk in that if you do a
bad AI use policy, it couldbe worse because then you you know,
restrict the judgment of the journalists andyou could either be you know, too
(20:33):
liberal in the policy and say,yeah, just do you say I as
much as possible, and then itmight absolve the journals of their own feeling
of you know, ethics and responsibilityand that like they should really review everything
that the AI puts out and factcheck it and a bunch of other obvious
things, you know. But Ithink there's also a risk to being too
(20:53):
restrictive with AI, because the thingis like it's here, everybody else has
it, and there's nothing going tobe bad actors, you know, and
ethical people using AI to make aton of content on the web, and
that's already happening. So I thinkthat the journalists aren't using AI. The
(21:14):
good journalists out there aren't using AIto get more leverage to put out good,
accurate, responsible content. But withmore the extra leverage technology can bring
than they risk falling behind and letthe bad actors you know, dominate the
conversation. So, you know,I think, like any other new technology,
(21:36):
it can be used, you know, wisely or poorly, And there's
kind of responsibility in every profession andparticularly journalism, to you know, not
be too slow to adapt new technologiesand smart ways to advance what their profession's
meant to do. Yeah, thinkingabout policies or not. I think is
interesting. And and then that gotme in a little bit of a tank
(22:00):
when I heard you thinking, Sopicture this cage match AI reporter versus human
reporter. Who wins? And why? Yeah? I think with that,
you know, I think there'd bea third winner, the human who uses
AI, because on one hand,you know, the AI only reporter wouldn't
(22:22):
have as much you know, wouldn'twouldn't have the judgment, wouldn't have access
to all the facts. Can't justyou know, network and call up a
source and do all the or atleast not yet, but you know,
do a lot of the work thatyou know is required to do good journalism.
And I think also, you know, part of what makes the journalism
good is that someone trusts the personwho writes it. So I think a
(22:45):
lot of people would be suspect ofwhat you know comes out from AI,
even if it happened to be accurate. But then again, you know,
the journalist who today is not usingAI would be wasting a lot of reps
compared to theoernals who is using AI. So just for like that very simple
example, let's say you know youhave journals, say journals B. Journalis
(23:07):
say now has to spend two hourstranscribing the injuries they did this morning.
Journalis B has already used AI totranscribe them and is writing the story.
Well, you know, journalist bejust scoop. Journalists say, simply by
having AI you know, transcribed forthem much less, you know, maybe
help brainstorm some some headline ideas,or to do some proof checking, or
(23:32):
help help them figure out which paragraphto cut. So so I think,
you know, when you when youthink of examples like that, it's clear
that the person using EYE is gonnakind of beat the person not using AI,
and there is a way they coulddo it, like in the example
I gave where you're probably not reallysacrificing any quality and accuracy. That said,
you know, there's a risk yougo too far using AI if you
(23:55):
have journalists see who's like, youknow what, I'm just gonna have AI
right the whole story. I'm goingto spend ten minutes looking it over for
tone, and I'm going to publishit. Well, there's a good chance
in the journal seat publishes something that'stotally inaccurate and they ruin their own credibility
or maybe open themselves up with alot reliabiliss lawsuits. So you know,
(24:15):
I think I think on middle roadwhere it's like, how do you leverage
the technology but not go overboard withit? You know, maybe an analogy
would be if you can imagine whencars first came out, right, It's
like, if you had the carand you had to go, you know,
get somewhere fifty miles away, you'llyou'll definitely beat the person with the
horse or the runner. But youknow, if you floor the car and
(24:37):
you don't maintain it, like there'sa good chance to a crash on the
way, and then you know theperson on the horse or even somebody just
walking will beat you because you'll you'llbe off preparing your car. So I
think it's you know, it's findingthat right way to use the technology to
get to where you want to go. Yeah, I think I agree with
you on that. I think Ithink that's a really good analogy. And
(24:59):
then going back to my very poorcage analogy, you know, the journalist
leveraging AI jumping in with the chairis going to dominate there. But I
do agree it's a middle ground andit'll be interesting to see how it evolves.
Because like you were talking about thehuman perspective, to curate, to
bring different things together, at leastat this point, to understand how to
(25:23):
capture emotion in a way that AIdoesn't, I think is going to be
really compelling. That And then alsoI think particularly you know with beat reporters
or trade reporters, you know there'ssomething innate in kind of their spidy senses
that they pick up. Having workedso deeply in these industries, having talked
(25:44):
to so many different experts in thefield, I think that becomes very,
very hard when you get into areal granular level to do on an AI.
You can get about eighty percent there, but it's a lot of times
it's that final fifteen to twenty percentthat makes a difference between a good article
and a great article. And Ithink that perspective really comes in. So
(26:07):
part of your research also then lookedat social media use, and you had
that more than half a journalist saysocial media is important or very important in
how they do their job, andX continues to dominate among journalists. Why
do you think that that's the case? Network effects are really powerful, So
(26:30):
you go somewhere where everyone else is, you know, they're going to be
there, there's some new place,and you can't count on everyone being there.
You don't have it. So Ithink there's a lot of journalists who
are dissatisfied with ACTS and you know, it's being used relatively, you know,
(26:52):
we have seen or reduction in usecompared to what it used to be
in the days when it was calledTwitter, but it's still by far the
dominant platform. And as much aspeople have thought about going elsewhere, there's
no clear other place to go.You know, some people have gone to
(27:12):
threads or blue Sky, but it'snot clear like is that the place to
be, And there just aren't asmany other people on there. So you
write something there, it's not goingto get as much engagement as it will
on X for the most part,and I think there is you know,
a certain immediacy to X, youknow. And another thing is that other
(27:36):
platforms, like they've seen, havingnews on your platform from the perspective of
social network is a big headache becauseno matter what you do, you're going
to get accused of biasing, youknow, one side or the other with
your algorithms, and someone will postsomething controversial and then you have to decide
if you want to take it downor not. And you have to worry
(28:00):
about a lot of advertisers who don'tlike the idea that, you know,
something might not be brand safe.You know, it's unfortunately often means news.
You know, it's has heard alot of news publishers on their own
websites, which is kind of collateraldamage, I think, unfortunately. So
so in a way, it's likethese other social networks like winning the news
(28:25):
game. Even if they could winit, it wouldn't serve their greater interests,
whereas x FK. Twitter has alwaysbeen all about the news, or
at least that's been a big partof it because it was the first social
platform to have immediacy and just thatinstant access, and it just has such
a history there that that I thinkit's gonna you know, preserve it spot
(28:52):
with that. And that's why wesee eighty one percent of journalists planned to
stay on That's this this year.So, you know, regardless of what
you think about it all, it'sso where it's all happened. Yeah,
And I had a friend of minewho writes for the Chicago Tribune and and
you know, she was saying,hey, you know, there's the immediate,
(29:12):
and then there's kind of the accurate, right, and so platforms like
Twitter and my point is you wantto be as accurate as possible, but
that allows you to get that immediacyto get out there, to start getting
ahead of the story. But thenyou've got the ability as you go into
the longer form of content, intothe online versions and then ultimately the features,
(29:33):
you know, to start with thenugget of news and see how it
comes out. But it's I thinkwe've seen time and time again love Twitter
or hate Twitter when something's happening orbreaking, where do people go first?
Right? Because that is that senseof immediacy that comes out, and then
the ability to build stories after that, to adjust correct facts as needed.
And that's been really interesting to lookat its effect on journalism and that as
(29:59):
an opp and your research showed otherplatforms, we don't want you to not
feel the love. They go toLinkedIn, they look at other things.
But I think when you were talkingabout, you know, the network effect
and really the immediacy of the feed, I think that's continued to give X
a bit of an advantage. Sowhy don't we switch switch a little bit
and let's talk a little bit aboutthe other side. Let's talk about the
(30:22):
corporate communicators, the agency sides,how we interact. I think as we've
talked so far, we've covered thatjournalists are really strapped. They've got to
put a lot of stories out.They got a lot of pressure. They're
trying to figure out where all thesethings come. How you mind this information?
And then you get the endless glut, the sea of pitches. You
(30:45):
know, many may not even berelevant to the journalists coming in. So
we're we're going to explore that alittle bit. But there was one stat
I found fascinating from this year's study. It actually surprised me. So most
journalists think that PR pros are importantto their success. And I thought that
maybe like a plurality or something likethat, But seventy percent of journalists say
(31:11):
PR pros are either important or veryimportant to their success. Why is that,
greg And then you feel the love, Yeah, it's yeah. I
think it's a surprising stat to alot because journalists are always complaining about how
many pitches they get and PR pros. But I think it is, you
know, reminded of deep down,like the journalists need sources, they need
(31:34):
to get accurate info and PR PRpros are their best friends for that.
And we see a lot of journalistsdo leverage the PR community, you know,
both to get story ideas because oftenthose PR people are in the rooms
where decisions are getting made and theysee the see the trends before anybody else.
(31:56):
And then also his stories are comingtogether. If there's a PR per
in the mix, there's someone toquickly send the headshot and the bio and
the uh you know, get thephoto they need, or dig up a
staff that they need in a waythat if you're only talking to executives at
a company, you know you're goingto be priority number four or five rather
than priority number one. So Ithink and I think that should be heartening
(32:21):
and that, you know, asmuch as a lot of people find,
hey, this pitch is getting ignoredor it's hard to break through, it
shows that if you do your jobright, you'll be viewed as a real
positive, as an asset. Youknow, you're not just you know,
just someone who's getting in someone someoneelse's way, And that shows you know,
when you do it right, youcan really excel in form deep relationships.
(32:45):
Yeah, and I think again oneof the big topics that's really coming
up as we talk today is likerelevance and so I mean for my UH,
for my corporate comes and UH anagency brethren, that's an ex staff.
That's seventy percent of journalists say theyneed us to help them do their
job, to provide context, togive access to experts in those type of
(33:08):
things. But yet the numbers arealso high when they get spammed. If
you spam a journalist, you're gonnaget ignored. About forty nine percent say
they, you know, respond topitches seldom to never. So if you're
not relevant, you know, don'texpect the courtesy. Hey, thanks for
sending me something that's completely off target. Despite low response rates, pitches still
(33:35):
come in. You have forty sixpercent of journalists receive six or more pitches
per day. That's more than thirtypitches per week. You know, probably
for some reporters they may get thirtypitches an hour for all, for all
I know. But the main reasonsjournalists reject pitches or don't give response is
if it's not relevant, if it'sjust if it's just a mass blast on
(33:59):
something. So Greg, maybe youcan talk a little bit about that and
then maybe that becomes a good avenuefor us to talk about how you guys
work at muckrack to help make surethat those that are using a tool are
being as relevant and useful as possibleto journalists. Yeah, we see that,
you know, when it comes topitching, I think it's really essential
(34:22):
to customize every single email you're sendingout and look at over when we I
mean, the reason we started muckrackone of them when we launched the part
for the PR community. We sawat the time you know that, you
know, I guess ten plus yearsago the status quo as you just say,
hey, I'm launching a tech product. Let me look up every tech
(34:45):
journalists, send you know, anemail to five hundred one thousand tech journalists.
Here's a new tech product. Andthen of course, you know,
tons of it's not relevant because you'reyou know, someone might write only about
B to B software and you're comingout with consumer piece of hardware, you
know, just a million other thingswhere you know if you spent the second
on it that that journals will nevercover it. So that's where we're really
(35:07):
big on figuring out, like,hey, look look at what the journalist
has actually written and tweeted about andotherwise create a content on and use that
to figure out the right journalists toget to contact. And then instead of
pitching five hundred journalists, pitch fivejournals in your first round, And if
(35:28):
you're only pitching five, you canput a tremendous amount of effort into each
pitch, how to frame it,researching the journals, connect with them on
social, kind of go all outthere. So I think that's a really
powerful opportunity. And then we've beenexcited we've been able to add on to
that with AI now where we launchthis new feature with our media lists.
(35:50):
So if you have a media list, it'll suggest new journals to add to
that media list based on who's alreadyon there. Kind of like if you've
used well, going back to ourearlier conversation about music, if you Spotify,
you set up a playlist and itsays, hey, you know,
you got these twenty songs on theplaylist, here's a few more you might
want to add based on those songs. It's that same concepts, So it's
(36:14):
like coming up with very targeted lists. But now I think but I can
also help you know, like,hey, who's maybe a couple of people
that you didn't think of that,you should start thinking about too, to
go after in a very creative way. Yeah, and and I think I
think that's that's great advice. Imean, there's obviously those journalists you're going
to have personal relationships with that aslong as you're giving them relevant information,
(36:37):
are going to help. But butthere's other there's other times when you're not
going to have that existing relationship,and that relevance I think is key.
And in some of your some ofyour research, and again I would recommend
everybody go to www. Dot muckrackdot com. That's where you can find
the latest research. Actually you canfind research for multiple years going back,
(37:00):
guys summed up kind of what youdescribed as the elements of the perfect pitch.
So let me just give a coupleof those stats here, because I
do think it's really important for thatrelevance. Eighty three percent of journalists to
be pitched via one on one email. So while you want to put stuff
out there and social and all ofthat, it's really about that personal connection
(37:22):
of the one on one email.As we talked earlier, it's not a
nine to five, five day aweek job. So sixty four percent of
journalists don't care which day of theweek they are pitched, and twenty two
percent prefer Monday. But it's notlike the old schedule of here's your window,
here's your time, here's your day. But people don't want to be
(37:44):
pinged at three o'clock in the morningtheir local time. And I stress that
media relations is often global. Don'tjust use a US centric time zone view
of the world. Forty four percentwant to receive pitches before noon on their
time. They want us to beconcise. Sixty five percent prefer pitches that
(38:04):
are under two hundred words and don'tsend wait an hour and be like,
oh my gosh, Greg hasn't gottenback to me. Did he get it?
Did he not get it? Fiftyone percent of journalists say follow up
is ideal, really when you're thinkingabout three to seven days later, So
to give me time to process thisand come back when you're relevant. Anything
else there on the perfect pitch oragain, how you guys have kind of
(38:28):
perfected your own algorithm to help communicationsprofessionals not just find the right journalists,
but kind of time their pitch trackcoverage. How are you taking all of
these insights and applying them into thetool. Yeah, well, we've really
focused on getting like the workflows justright, so figuring out, like Cay,
if you have a whole bunch ofjournalists you might want to talk to,
(38:52):
how do you narrow it down tojust the right journalists? Then how
do you tailor the pitch to beperfect for each one? And that's where
we really focused on. Having theworkflows so it's easy to start with your
template of the facts you know youneed to get out to everybody, but
then have a view where you cansee every journalist who want to pitch,
(39:13):
customize exactly what you want to sayto each person. While you're customizing it,
having access to all the context onthat journal it's that you need to
have, and then being able toconnect that with your inbox send it.
Another key thing that we've really focusedon too is building a CRM so that
you can track all those conversations andmake it available only to your team in
(39:36):
an encrypted way, which is reallypowerful because we find what happens, especially
now in the age remote work,you have an in house corporate coms team
or a PR agency, everybody's busy, everyone's pitching all the time, and
then you know it happens. Youdon't realize that you're about to pitch someone
that you're colleague pitched two hours agoand it's going to look unprofessional, or
(39:57):
you know you're going to pitch someonecold, but it turns out your worker
knows that person really well, andif you'd only known, you do much
better off getting a friendly intro.So by having that shared source of knowledge
in the CRM, we really helpour customers like no, like, what's
the total context on this relationship versusjust thinking of each pitches. It's so
(40:17):
on transaction. Yeah, that makesa lot of sense. So as you
make life easier for journalists by managingthe flow bringing their spam down, do
you get a lot of really goodbirthday presence as Hey, Greg, thanks
for thanks for getting my pitch isa little more focused focused to me.
Yeah, I don't know how manyof our customers know no my birthday,
(40:39):
but it is a treat. WheneverI go to an industry conference and I
meet some people who've been using thesoftware, I've got a lot of people
who just say, Hey, thetech we've done is giving them their Friday
back because they used to have todo a ton of kind of copy and
pasting and now now we do itor got them a raise or a promotion
because they got that article that theywant. And for me, that's always
(41:02):
the most gratifying part because I canlook at we have lots of usage data
and I can look at the aggregatestats on how many tens of thousands of
people are logging me in every dayand how active they are, But that
the never compares is you know,meeting an actual human one on one where
our software is helped. For me, that's always the most motivating part of
(41:22):
the job. Yeah, and it'sagain I think what's so fascinating and powerful
And while you guys have seen somuch growth in your model is that it's
been grounded and kind of like,even though it's serving the PR community,
it's really grounded in journalists first kindof mindset, which I think is really
important. And you talked about theworkflows and the process. You know,
(41:45):
maybe we can talk about AI andin a little bit different way before we
wrap here, not generative AI,but machine learning and how you've tapped that
at at muck rack. I mean, can you can you explain for our
listeners a little bit what is anuance between machine learning and generative AI,
and and how does that help youcontinue to one better serve journalists and PR
(42:09):
professionals, but just continue to innovateand evolve as Mark Rack. Yeah,
it's a great, great point,and I think it's important to you know,
go into a language and our like. AI is a very general term
that encompasses both. You know,one type of AIS machine learning. Another
(42:29):
type of AI is generative AI.And we've been using machine learning for you
know, almost since the inception ofMark Rack, you know, well over
a decade or fifteen years old nowto do things like analyze articles, figure
out who wrote the article, asthe sentiment positive or negative. You know,
(42:50):
you know when the article is written, and all this stuff sounds simple,
but when you apply it, weare processing millions of articles every day.
You know, some we get instructuredformats from licensing deals we have and
you know, special data pipes wehave from publishers. But you know,
some of the content might just beyou know, some blog that started a
(43:10):
week ago, and we have toyou know, our technology needs to figure
out what's going on there in avery unstructured way. So we brought machine
learning to bear for a long timeto solve those problems for our customers.
And then more recently in the lastyear we've added a lot of generative AI
functionality with presspal Ai. We justlaunched our AI powered word clouds this week
(43:35):
so that customers can put together reallyadvanced word clouds in real time on all
the coveries that they're getting. Andthat's where you know, both you know,
using this combination of machine learning insome cases generative in another case,
I can really push to sell professionforward and we're excited about the role we
have to play in it. Oh, I love me a good word cloud.
(43:58):
I'm glad that you guys are provingthat because as simple as it sounds,
if you get the algorithm right topop things like that, it really
does tell a really powerful story interms of what you're looking at and seeing.
So that's great kind of the applicationof machine learning, and just the
continued iteration that you've done since sincetwo thousand and nine has been amazing.
(44:23):
One last question before we kind ofwrap here, Greg So and I forgot
to point out earlier the research thatyou did was global. It's not just
US base. You travel quite alot globally, meeting with members of the
industry, members of the media,maybe you can offer a little bit of
a different perspective. Are the trendsthat we're seeing here in North America?
(44:45):
Are you seeing very similar things globallyor are you hearing anything different as you
talk to communicators and journalists around theglobe. I think the trends are global.
I think a lot of stuff happensfirst here before at least it gets
(45:06):
to the UK and Europe. Sosometimes you can kind of see a bit
of dispair, and sometimes it goesthe other way too. So I think
the old line, I think itwas asthmth you said it, like the
future is here, it's just notevenly distributed. It's definitely true with journalism
and pr two that you can lookto some countries and see they've pushed further
(45:28):
ahead with digital, whereas others there'shavings as much, which I think is
a great reason to travel and torun global enterprises and to talk connect with
colleagues in other countries, because we'vegot lots of great ideas both, some
ideas that might push you forward andbe like, oh, they're trying that
there, we should try that heretoo, And sometimes other times we were
(45:49):
like oh wait, we're you know, trying this thing here, but we
can't count on somebody in another countryalready being as far along with that,
so we're going to have to slowdown in that market and figure out it
out. So it's always just somethingI find really really fascinating. And the
fun thing about pr and journalism isthat's your global whether or not you want
(46:09):
to be. Because you might bea company that only operates in you know,
one city in the US, butif somebody writes about you who's based
in London or even you know,on the other side of the world in
Australia, your next door neighbor mightsee that article and not come to your
store decide to come to your storebecause of that. So there's there's this
(46:31):
element where, you you know,even if your neighborhood coffee shop, you
kind of have to worry about theglobal media environment because things can travel from
one end of the world to anotherin a millisecond. Yeah, that is
so true. So this has beenan absolute fascinating discussion. I would invite
all of our listeners to UH toagain visit muckrac dot com, where you
(46:53):
can learn more about the platform andtheir resources. You've got all the re
search. I'd also encourage you toreach out to Greg. He travels the
globe, He's talking to everybody,and if you find him on social media,
he tends to be first name ona lot of these platforms, so
he's easy to find from that standpoint. And you know, as we think
(47:17):
about our discussion here today, Imean it really starts with bringing a journalists
first point of view, Greg,as you talked about just the founding of
muckrach and what's been so powerful isstarting with that journalist's point of view,
understanding what their workload is, whattheir need, what their challenge is,
having a little bit of empathy.We had a great discussion about the cage
(47:39):
match AI reporter versus human reporter,and I think our answer is kind of
the cyborg hybrid of both is probablyyou know, one of the strongest there.
And we talked about the importance ofX still being a big news source
from the network effect, and thenwe talked about really the importance of having
(48:01):
a tailored, timely pitch that's relevantand how you can use something like muck
rack to make sure you're being reallyrelevant. What did I miss? Greg?
Any any final thoughts before we closehere, any words of advice to
the comms professionals out there. Ithink that's a great summary. I'd say
just check out before report, cometo mycrack dot com and you can all
(48:24):
read it for yourself. And we'realways coming out with you features, so
keep watching the space. Greg.It's always a pleasure to talk to you.
I'm always always inspired to see whatit is that you're coming up next.
I could talk to you for hoursabout those type of things. Thank
you so much for joining us onthe podcast, and thank you listeners for
(48:45):
tuning in. Drop us a linewith your thoughts on today's episode, and
check back soon for the latest episodesof Building Brand Gravity. I'm Steve Halsey,
your host. Thank you for joiningme and Greg, thanks again for
joining Building Brand Gravity. Great.Thanks you, Steve, you will.
We are GNS Business Communications. Weare a team of media strategists, storytellers,
(49:09):
and engagement experts who meet you atthe intersection of business and communications.
To learn more, visit gscommunications dotcom. You're listening to Building Brand Gravity
Attracting people into your Orbit, aGNS Business Communications podcast. Keep connected with
(49:29):
us by subscribing to the show inyour favorite podcast player. If you like
what you've heard, please rate theshow that helps us to keep delivering the
latest in industry influence. Thanks forlistening, Until next time.
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